Katakana Chart カタカナ

 If I tell you that this post was brought to you by the assistance of tippex (white out for the Americans) because I didn’t want to restart my chart a second time, you will understand that I really prefer hiragana to katakana.  My mind just works better with the hiragana forms.  They are clearer and more distinct to me & some of the katakana are just plain evil - the sa symbol is stolen from se in hiragana, and obviously done just to confuse learners… Likewise, I have issues with the shi/n/so/tsu group - in many fonts, I find it impossible to tell whether something is shi or tsu without having them side by side to tell which has the more upright angle of the ticks - a little like being able to tell whether something is a coyote or a wolf when they are side by side, but not separate.  The odds are that in this location, it’s a coyote, but what if it’s just a really unusual word and it is tsu? Mixing my metaphors there, but you get the idea.

In addition to having to learn two separate writing systems for the syllabaries, there is the fact that I don’t encounter katakana as often as I do hiragana when I am reading Japanese, for obvious reasons.  Except when I am using my 15 minute bonus experience time on Duolingo and I run through the hiragana and katakana practice items one after another because they are quick and 20 points each the first time you do them in a day…

A lot of people say that English only has one script to learn, but they are ignoring the fact that English has upper case and lower case, and that at some point in time, they introduce you to cursive script, and the letters change shape again (& again, both upper and lower case letters) and you have to learn the correct locations for joining them to the next letter - which can change drastically as the letter neighbour changes.

And that’s without getting any “old timey” fonts, where the capital S looks like an F, leading to an entire choir having issues with the song “Where the bee sucketh, there suck I”… and one school I went to wanted you to write cursive s like an o with a line stuck out the right side to join to the next letter, like an overinflated tick (the blood-feasting invertebrate, not the mark for getting a question right), while another school wanted the s to look like a non-cursive s, but a sloped-line ran up its back to join up to the start of the letter, and then another one had to run out of the base to the next letter after it - rather like hiding the tail of the Christmas tree lights on the tree.  I think we only say that English has one system because we grew up with it and so have not paused to analyse it.

As I am quietly not analyzing using s instead of z in these posts, nor including my ‘u’ in words like colour, because Sensei said we could write in our own language if we had a different first language…